Cherry Jones guest of honor at Elliot Norton Awards

Sunday

May 7, 2017 at 9:30 AMMay 7, 2017 at 3:30 PM

By R. Scott Reedy, Daily News Correspondent

Actress Cherry Jones laughs heartily when asked if she reads her reviews.

“I’ve always kind of wanted to know what everybody thought of a production – whether it was my Aunt Fanny Lou or a critic. At my age now, though, I only read the good reviews,” explained the 60-year-old by telephone last week from London, where she recently made her West End debut as Amanda Wingfield in a production of “The Glass Menagerie” that originated at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.

Jones is one of today’s most accomplished and respected stage actresses, and Guest of Honor at the 35th annual Elliot Norton Awards, Boston’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony Awards. The Boston Theater Critics Association will hand out the awards May 15 at the Boston University Theatre.

The awards honor this region’s finest actors and theater productions. They are named for Boston’s dean of American drama critics, Elliot Norton, who died in 2003 at the age of 100. Tony-winner Diane Paulus, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater will be awarded the group’s Prize for Sustained Excellence.

Jones forged her early career in Boston as a member of the American Repertory Theater’s acting company.

“It was 1980, Robert Brustein had left Yale to found the A.R.T. at Harvard, and I was brought in to play Rosalind in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It.’ I was both thrilled and terrified,” recalls Jones, a graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. “Tommy Derrah, Karen McDonald, Tony Shalhoub and Marianne Owen were already there when I arrived and they helped me a lot. We’ve all been friends for life ever since.”

And not only friends, but also frequent co-stars.

“We were all in a 1982 production of Chekhov’s ‘The Three Sisters,’ right after returning from a three-month European tour,” said Jones, a five-time Tony nominee and two-time winner of the Tony Award for Best Actress in Play – for the 1995 revival of “The Heiress” and for “Doubt” in 2005. “We were so tight, it was amazing. Annie Pitoniak was with us, too, doing our show in repertory with ‘’Night Mother.’”

A Tennessee native, Jones gives credit not only to her co-stars but also to director Andrei Serban – recipient of the 1999 Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence from the Boston Theater Critics Association for his work at the A.R.T. – for the success of “The Three Sisters” and more.

“Andrei’s ‘Twelfth Night,’ which we did in 1989, is probably my very favorite production of all time. I loved working with Andrei. Whenever he entered a room, he was 100 percent energy and vision. He was a marvelous director, but also a devil. He was very demanding. He would change the blocking up to two minutes before call-time on opening night.

“He would come up to me just before a show and say, in his wonderful Romanian accent, ‘Cherry, I need you to enter from the right.’ It didn’t matter that I’d entered from the left during every rehearsal,” remembers Jones, who won the 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series playing Allison Taylor, the first female president of the United States, on Fox-TV’s “24,” and can now be seen in seasons two and three of “Transparent” on Amazon.

“You had to run the show in your head continuously, just to keep all his changes straight. There are very few commercial plays that will ever ask you to be as physical as the plays we did at the A.R.T. did. It was great training for an actor.”

While Jones has done 25 A.R.T. productions over the years – most recently the 2013 John Tiffany-directed production of Tennessee Williams’ “Menagerie,” which transferred to Broadway that same year, to the Edinburgh International Festival last summer, and, in January of this year, to London – some of her fondest memories of her time with the company have happened off stage.

“I loved Cambridge. I had my own little apartment and it was all so bucolic compared to New York City. I can still remember walking across Radcliffe Yard on my first day in town and being handed a freshman balloon. I was 24 at the time, so it was very flattering to be mistaken for a freshman.”

That balloon wasn’t the only thing handed to Jones – who has appeared in 14 Broadway shows to date and now lives in New York with her wife, filmmaker Sophie Huber – in those early days that left a lasting impression.

“As an employee of the A.R.T., I got a Harvard Officer card that allowed me to use the pool and the libraries, too. I was so impressed with that card that I took a picture of it with my Canon AE-1 and sent it home to my parents.”

Jones says her parents, both now deceased, were happy with more than just the building access their daughter received at Harvard.

“Jan and Jeremy Geidt and their daughters were like my family in Cambridge, which meant a lot to my parents. All of us had a great time at Jan and Jeremy’s house on Garden Street. That house is gone now, and Jeremy has passed away, but the memories will always live on. It was the warmest, most welcoming place. And Jan was always feeding us. It was paradise.”

For Jones – who will reunite with old friends this weekend to help Brustein celebrate his 90th birthday – it was also the beginning of lasting friendships with the Geidts and other more senior members of the acting company, including the legendary Alvin Epstein.

“A couple of years ago, I was in Boston and I decided to take Alvin with me to see Tommy Derrah in SpeakEasy Stage’s production of ‘Casa Valentina.’ It seemed like a great idea. I’d pick up Alvin at his place and drive him into the city. I love to drive, but it didn’t take me very long to remember that if you don’t do it often, you cannot drive in Boston.

“I ended up getting lost and going the wrong way on one-way streets. It was so bad, I was shaking and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God. I’m going to kill us both. Alvin was 90 at the time, though, so none of it seemed to bother him. He just took it all in stride,” says Jones with another hearty laugh.

And while the actress, who has been seen in feature films including “Erin Brockovich” and “The Perfect Storm,” may have been relieved that Epstein withheld comment on her driving skills, she not only appreciates insightful criticism of her performances on stage, she sometimes makes use of it.

“Recently, I was called on something I’d been doing for a long time in ‘Menagerie.’ When I use a criticism, it in no way affects what a director has asked of me, but I was able to make a slight change that was helpful.”